Ask HN: Remote Internship - <AUTHOR>

I am a CS student studying in Bangalore right now. I love all aspects of CS and its been a great ride so far. I am however more interested in and have experience (lots of hobby projects) in web development and android development. I love learning new stuff and I can quickly pick up as I go. I'm also really dedicated and quite often can't sleep till I solve the problem I'm stuck on. (sometimes sleep actually helps more!)
I have to do a short internship and I would love to work for a startup. I would really appreciate it if you guys could point me in the right directions. What places to apply for, because most of the startups don't list internships in the jobs page.
A bit more about me: I love writing code and reading code! Quite often I spend more time reading code of notable projects on github than writing it. I love learning from people who are better than me and working on real world problems. I can pick up something quite fast, I often just do a hobby project in a technology I dont know just to learn it. Infact reading documentation has become like second nature by now. I still do have a long way to go and so I would love to work with more experienced people solving real world problems. I think it would be a great opportunity for me to learn more and get some invaluable experience. I am passionate about clean design and like working with javascript (I would say I am good at javascript). I am also strong in python and also Android. I have experience in Android and can implement fairly complex applications/UI in android too.
Thanks in advance! (sorry it's a bit too long) <comment><USER2> Look for the who's hiring thread every month. They have a quite a few internships on there. Otherwise network heavily and market yourself to positions you'd like for start-ups either in the states or the ones in Bangalore. It'd probably also be helpful if you linked your website/github here or a resume so other people could contact you if they thought you'd fit or point you in a better direction.

<comment><AUTHOR> Since I cant edit the post, I am going to add my github link here. It's not much so far.

[https://github.com/aeonaxan](https://github.com/aeonaxan)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Sign up for ProjectXpresso.com, in the 'Job you're interested in' field, specifically refer to this thread, and we'll link you up with someone who can help.

All the best.

<comment><USER4> I run ProjectXpresso. Thanks for the recommendation! We're throwing another event on Feb 1st and have official partners from EA games, Monetate, and MongoDB (some others are in the works) helping students learn about what its like to work there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Apply for Google Summer of Code! They'll pay you to work remotely on an open source project, even internationally.

<comment><AUTHOR> yes I saw that and its pretty great. I'm thinking of applying. have you done it, if so any tips?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Good luck.</comment>


This AI tells you if your website is too cluttered - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2014-05/02/eyequant-clarity-index

<comment><USER2> Designers are going to be the next victims of the insatiable rise of AI. WOW.

</comment><comment><USER3> Sounds neat. Looks pretty cool. Trial is 3 tests? Is there so little long term value they won't let you play with it for a couple of days unlimited?</comment>


Nix fixes dependency hell - <AUTHOR> http://www.linux.com/archive/feature/155922?theme=print

<comment><USER2> The article is from 2008. Link to the project page: <http://nixos.org/> with links to a video and slides from 2011

</comment><comment><USER3> Oh please, dependency hell was fixed yonks ago.

Examples of dependency hell from within the past few years more than welcome. Contrived examples mixing strange non-compatible repositories perhaps not so much...</comment>


See Something, Send Something (including your personally identifiable info?) - <AUTHOR> https://www.ny.gov/programs/see-something-send-something <comment><AUTHOR> Saw this app this morning, struck me as surprising since I would expect the app to send much more than the picture to law enforcement (GPS coordinates, IMEI, other personally identifiable info).</comment>


Was there a civilization on Earth before humans? - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/are-we-earths-only-civilization/557180/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> This is one of my all-time favorite "what if" questions. Some years ago a friend of mine coily posed this same question to me: What does humankind make that would survive 60 million years into the future, and if some other advanced industrial civilization had existed 60 million years ago, how would we know?

It turns out my friend had put a LOT of thought into this exact question. Enough to do a masters in geology, his work ultimately making it into a high profile journal with writeups in places like the NY Times.

He started talking to various geologists about what might survive as telltale markers of our civilization. Buildings or structures of any sort? Ha! Statues and monuments? Maybe we'd notice the odd deposit or two of minerals.

After going through a long list of candidates, he settled on carbon cenospheres. These are little balls of carbon almost exclusively made in internal combustion engines as the result of aerosolizing fossil fuels. Sixty million years ago, our love of the ICE will show up in the fossil record as a light dusting of cenospheres covering the earth—contemporaneous with massive numbers of species going extinct due to mankind's other influence.

And as my friend was telling me his story, this is where my hair stood on end. Sixty million years ago we see a massive species extinction... and a light dusting of carbon cenospheres covering the globe.

But we also see unnatural levels of iridium at the same point. And, while it's hypothetically possible some industrial civilization was mining iridium and blanketing the globe with it, it's more probable that the iridium was delivered by an asteroid.

But how would you know? So my friend, as part of his research, went taking samples of his cenospheres from around the globe. What he found was interesting: namely, the further one gets from the Yucatan (where scientists had already validated there was an asteroid strike), the cenospheres get smaller. The big heavy ones precipitated out of the air closest to the Yucatan asteroid strike. Hardly likely to be coincidence.

So much for ancient civilization this time around.

However, his work rewrote a critical understanding of the KT asteroid extinction event. Namely, we previously thought most of the carbon at the KT boundary was the result of giant forest fires ignited by the strike. However we now know that the strike must have aerosolized massive oil fields under the Yucatan at that time and set them ablaze.

Not a bad contribution to science starting from a sci-fi premise!

<comment><USER3> > Not a bad contribution to science starting from a sci-fi premise!

1\. Ancient civilization enters industrial and post-industrial era.

2\. Carbon levels rise, so do global temperatures.

3\. In a desperate attempt to save themselves they try geo-engineering by slamming a massive asteroid in the too hot and thus unpopulated area of Yucatan.

4\. Goes wrong.

I can see it working as sci-fi novel

<comment><USER4> Maybe the Earth-based technological civilization attracted the attention of a space-faring civilization, who dropped an asteroid to wipe out the Earth civilization (successfully, as it turns out).

Which means maybe we should be a bit more careful about bleating our existence out into the universe these days...

<comment><USER5> People who had this thought have also liked "The Dark Forest" and "Death's End" by Liu Cixin :) (These are part 2 and 3 in the "Three Body Problem" series.)

<comment><USER6> Also 'The Forge of God' [0] by Greg Bear [1987]:

"We've been sitting in our tree chirping like foolish birds for over a century now, wondering why no other birds answered. The galactic skies are full of hawks, that's why. Planetisms that don't know enough to keep quiet, get eaten".

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forge_of_God](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forge_of_God)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Ants are a good candidate for a second civilization. They live on every continent except Antarctica, they build complex structures, they invented argriculture millions of years before humans did (!), and they live in socially stratified societies. But I guess it ultimately comes down to your definition of what is a civilization.

If we were to find evidence of an industrial civilization before humans we might not even recognize it as evidence, given how different it might be from ours.

<comment><USER8> > they live in socially stratified societies

This is gross anthropomorphism. Ants don't have societies any more than the cells in our body have societies.

An ant colony is an organism. Each individual ant has just enough neurons to do the one task that ant does. The overall organism is quite capable, true, but it's not intelligent. It doesn't learn novel things, it doesn't purposely invent, it doesn't 'know' anything.

Ants may take over the world some day, but they won't know it.

<comment><USER9> Ants pass the mirror test, which is something very few animals are capable of.

<comment><USER10> Wait really? Do you have a source for this, I'd love to learn more.

<comment><USER11> No source, but iirc the scientists applied a colored dot on the ants head. When they saw themselves in the mirror the started trying to remove it from their heads.

<comment><USER12> There are parasitic mites that attach themselves to ants and they look like a colored dot (usually red). I think the ant "thinking" that the dot was a mite is a much more plausible explanation than the that the ant is some how conscious with its cluster of like 3 and a half neurons

<comment><USER13> So the ant (allegedly -- I'm eagerly awaiting that source!) saw a dot on the ant in the mirror, and tried to remove the dot on its own forehead. The key point: that looks an awful lot like the identification of the self with the reflected image.

The issue you brought up about the mite is a bit orthogonal to this point. I can give you that the ant was concerned about the possibility of having a mite, and the point still remains that the ant thought it was on its own head only on basis of a reflected image of itself. (Compare to the alternative behavior: the ant tries to get the mite off the reflected image, never making any attempt to remove it from itself.)

<comment><USER11> it was on hn a while back. the link is dead now. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14146776](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14146776)

it's on wikipedia, with the same dead source [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_test?wprov=sfti1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_test?wprov=sfti1)

EDIT: Working link to the paper (in some journal of science): [https://www.udocz.com/read/are-ants-capable-of-self- recognit...](https://www.udocz.com/read/are-ants-capable-of-self-recognition- pdf)

[http://difusion.ulb.ac.be/vufind/Record/ULB- DIPOT:oai:dipot....](http://difusion.ulb.ac.be/vufind/Record/ULB- DIPOT:oai:dipot.ulb.ac.be:2013/219269/Details)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> One strong argument against a civilization in the last 100 million years or so is that our separate continents have clearly been completely isolated, and gone separate evolutionary paths.

If there was a planetary civilization 20 million years ago, there are tons of "invasive species" that would have spread across all continents then rather than in the 1800s. Think rats, sparrows, cockroaches, etc x 1000.

I don't think I have an argument against one back in Pangean times though.

<comment><USER10> What if it were a civilization of ocean-dwelling creatures?

That would make the whole premise more plausible for a number of reasons.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter briefly touched on this idea in The Light of Other Days.

(Spoiler) The book is primarily concerned with the development of a miniaturized wormhole technology which allows remote viewing anywhere on Earth, and the effects this has on privacy, etc. They discover it can also be used to view backwards in time, and at the end of the book they trace the tree of life backwards towards the universal common ancestor, and discover that it was a microbe seeded deep in a geothermal vent by a civilization of intelligent trilobyte/arthropod like creatures, which knew its own extinction was imminent at the hand of a massive asteroid.

<comment><USER16> Thank you!! I have been looking for this book in my own sci-fi bookcase a number of times having forgotten both author + title. Got it now :)

This is a great book!

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> "It's not often that you write a paper proposing a hypothesis that you don't support."

We should all do this at least once. What a great practice.

</comment><comment><USER18> The fact that we found pressurized oil reservoirs ("gusher" oil wells) means that nothing had tapped these cheap and easy sources of energy before.

<comment><USER19> Not just oil, we probably wouldn't have an an iron age without access to unmolested surface deposits.

Iron, tin, copper. If there was a pre-human civilization, they couldn't have gone beyond the stone age, else they'd have consumed the resources our iron age depended on.

<comment><USER14> Unless they shipped the metals off planet, that's not really an argument. If anything, an iron using civilization would have made iron more concentrated and easier to find.

<comment><USER20> Aluminum sure, but iron rusts. In tens of millions of years you could have oxides of iron from a civilization, but no workable steel or iron. Aluminum might survive, gold and platinum would be fine, but not iron. It doesn't matter though, we'd have gone through many cycles of subduction and renewal in such a long time, so we'd have new surface deposits. Coal and oil would even have started to form over such a long time scale.

<comment><USER21> What do you mean by "workable steel or iron" ? We're not mining for steel, and it's not like iron age started with finding some magic store of "workable iron" instead of iron oxides - the surface iron and mined iron deposits e.g. hematite, magnetite, etc _are_ oxides of iron. The fully oxidized remains of a scrapyard would form pretty much perfect iron ore.

Our iron (and other metal) mining is not "using iron up", it's just bringing the iron closer to the surface and transforming it in ways that will be undone by millions of years. Fossil fuels are a different case, though.

<comment><USER20> The majority is hematite, but iron exposed to air will not form hematite, or even magnetite, but _hydrated_ oxides. That iron will also be spread out over large areas in low concentrations, not richly concentrated ores of oxides. It would be economically and energetically unfeasible to gather hydrated oxides from rusted metal and then try to make workable iron from it. It's certainly possible, but it would be a kind of insane process with low yields.

The other problem is that you need to use coke as a reducing agent, so we're back to fossile fuels.

<comment><USER22> Charcoal also work as a reducing agent. The problem with using charcoal is that you're going to be using up a lot of wood to make it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> An older period: Carboniferous [0]

Lots of plastic non biodegradable (at the moment): lignin. That's why we have coal, which fueled our Industrial Revolution :)

Ended with the Carboniferous rainforest collapse, caused by climate change.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carboniferous](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carboniferous)

</comment><comment><USER24> Me: "It would be amazing to go out to the asteroid belt and return a rare- earth metal rich asteroid to solve that problem once and for all."

Other: "That's what the dinosaurs thought."

</comment><comment><USER25> As the article points out, an ancient industrial civilization would need to mine resources. I think it is fair to say that they would mine a lot of gold and silver for use in electronics. If such a civilization existed then one would think that most of the earth's natural veins of gold and silver would have been mined making large easy to find naturally occurring veins rare. It seems though that our civilization has found plenty of easy to find large scale veins of gold and silver.

Does that not make it unlikely that any ancient industrial civilization lasting centuries could have existed before us? Or over tens of millions of years would more naturally occurring easy to find veins of gold and silver rise to the surface of the Earth's crust?

<comment><USER26> > Or over tens of millions of years would more naturally occurring easy to > find veins of gold and silver rise to the surface of the Earth's crust?

i am not a geologist but, as i understand it, plate tectonics cause a lot of "churn" in the crust. so i think it is certainly conceivable that a civilization could mine all the accessible veins to exhaustion but have many more veins brought up near the surface in the following 60 million years.

<comment><USER25> Yah, as I wrote my comment I realized that it made sense that there would be churn. I am not a geologist though. It is a fascinating notion. It makes me think of Mote Cook's Numenera [http://numenera.com](http://numenera.com)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> The nuclear war between the Dinosaurs and the Martian Kangaroos laid waste to both their planets 65 million years ago. The final phase occurred when the Martian forward base on the moon, from where they bombarded the earth, was wiped out by asteroidal bombardment by the dinosaurs. Then the Venusians moved in and finished the job, eliminated all the remaining dinosaurs and the Martian kangaroo people and retreated behind their cloud cover. A few 'roos survived, but retroevolved to a pastoral state. We had better tread with care - lest we anger Venus...

</comment><comment><USER28> I wish this article had also gone into how long indicators might survive outside of Earth. Could satellites survive? Things on moon or Mars? Might we go to Mars and find some old Mars Rover or underground base or that we left Mars for Earth after we made it uninhabitable?

Edit: typo has -> had

<comment><USER29> Anything on the surface will be eroded by micometeorites over millions of years. The lunar surface is a layer of dust several meters thick that is the product of that erosion.

Underground artefacts might survive longer, since there is no plate tectonics and little other geological activity, but finding them would be difficult.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> We don't even know about previous human civilizations.

Recently discovered Göbekli Tepe[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe), the oldest megalith structure, confirmed by radiocarbon tests to be more than 12.000 years old with massive stone pillars and 3d relief stone sculptures mostly still buried is still a mystery to science and some "scientists" still think hunter-gatherers built it with stone chisels.

The interesting thing is that a study based on the drawings on the structure correlated with Younger Dryas period might explain why nothing was found about the ancient civilization that built it.

[https://phys.org/news/2017-04-ancient-stone-pillars-clues- co...](https://phys.org/news/2017-04-ancient-stone-pillars-clues-comet.html)

[https://www.newscientist.com/article/2128512-ancient- carving...](https://www.newscientist.com/article/2128512-ancient-carvings- show-comet-hit-earth-and-triggered-mini-ice-age/)

So after all the Atlantis and the flood myth found in most cultures from around the world might be real.

<comment><USER31> > _...and some "scientists" still think hunter-gatherers built it with stone > chisels._

Well yes, that's how actual scientists work: on evidence. Until there's evidence to the contrary, the most likely hypothesis is that the structures were built with the tools and labor that we think humans possessed at the time.

I didn't find anything in your links that mentioned the myth of Atlantis.

<comment><USER32> > I didn't find anything in your links that mentioned the myth of Atlantis.

Do a YouTube search for Younger Dryas.

<comment><USER31> You're kidding, right? I'm getting Joe Rogan podcasts, channels like "Atlantis in the Java Sea", "Joe Rogan University" (...). I'm not watching any of that shit. I feel dumber just for knowing that "Joe Rogan University" exists.

Point me towards something that _isn 't_ part of the Kook Productions Network please.

<comment><USER32> > I'm not watching any of that shit.

Even if the best academic papers on the topic are likely to have less obviously incorrect information, you'd probably still learn a lot more by just sitting down and watching all the videos. I haven't seen the Joe Rogan thing that comes up, but I doubt that watching it would magically make you dumber or whatever.

<comment><USER31> I have to politely disagree. Sure, one video isn't a big deal -- it's just five or ten minutes. But, if I followed up every silly idea presented online with five or ten minutes of watching kooky videos, then yeah, I'd end up less knowledgeable than if I stuck to the stuff that tends to come from better sources.

Also, I've met enough smart people infected by silly ideas to know that nobody is immune to misinformation. Maybe I'm bored and one of those videos leads me down some YouTube rabbit hole that gets me stuck on some nonsense. I'd probably never see it coming; the people who listened to a little too much Coast to Coast surely didn't.

So while I'm excited by new ideas on just about every subject, I also have something of an immune response to them, a conscious decision that I'd rather be uninformed -- and maybe spend that time reading a book or doing something fun outside -- than misinformed. Since I'm not smart enough to know what's right and what's not when I don't know anything about the subject, I rely on the source as a strong signal of trustworthiness.

HN's just about the only guilty pleasure I've got left, but the S:N here is still better than a lot of other places.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> This reminds me of Lovecraft. His mythos was based on the premise that Earth has been inhabited by a series of alien and native civilizations, mostly malign, over the past billion years. Occasionally an artifact or part of a city is thrust to the surface by geologic forces. According to Lovecraft, after humanity falls a race of intelligent beetles will arise.

<comment><USER34> I think Lovecraft's aliens were more indifferent to humans than malign, or at best slightly annoyed, the way a human might be by a small anthill in their yard. As far as I know, Lovecraft hated the theistic ideal of humanity being the "center of God's creation" and wanted to portray a universe where humans were utterly insignificant and incapable of dealing with the scale of horrors that awaited beyond the safety of the anthill.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> My all time favorite theory: [http://pbfcomics.com/comics/dinosaur- meteors/](http://pbfcomics.com/comics/dinosaur-meteors/)

</comment><comment><USER36> We left some evidence of our existence on the moon so the next civilization will be able to find that even millions of years from now, perhaps.

<comment><USER37> Does LIDAR penetrate dust? I wonder what we might find if we scanned the entire Moon...

<comment><USER38> We have LIDAR scans of most of the moon.

[https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_2...](https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_2110.html)

[https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/clementine.html](https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/clementine.html)

[https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/experimentDisplay.do?id=1994...](https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/experimentDisplay.do?id=1994-004A-04)

[https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/201200...](https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20120012916.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> On a side, Hindus believe in 4 Yuga's or phases that go around and round in circles, we are in the fourth one at the moment. Humans exist in all Yuga's and there is then a mahayuga after which there is destruction

<comment><USER40> After that destruction, the cycle starts all over again. It is the closest thing to evolution formulated by the Indian rishis (scientists of their time). It begins with (on a high level) the water based living beings (fish), amphibians (turtle), mammal (boar), neanderthal (Parashuram), the perfect humans (Ram & Krishna) and so on. It is quite interesting.

Another name for Hinduism is Sanatana Dharma - or the Eternal Way of Life.

<comment><USER41> > scientists of their time

Please don't masquerade mythologocal saints/yogis as scientists. You are doing a disservice to the accomplishments of real historical figures like Panini, Brahmagupta etc by making statements like this. You don't have to resort to mythological characters to feel good about the supposed glorious past.

I can understand how the tales of Dasavataras can possibly have some allegorical references to evolution but claiming the rishis to be scientists only serves to further ridiculous beliefs like Quantum Mechanics and Relativity originated from Vedas, Rishi scientists developed nuclear weapons in 10000 BC etc.

The main purpose they(Puranas (post-vedic Hindu mythology)) served was to legitimize the Vishnu cult, get rid of the pantheon of older Vedic gods (Indra etc.) and to counter the rise of Buddhism. Most of these stories were made up ad hoc to suit the purposes of their times. I find them quite clever to be honest and fascinating from literary and sociological perspectives.

Take Buddha for example. Once Buddhism and its crusade against animal slaughter / rituals became a hit with the masses and started competing with Brahmanism/Sanatan Dharma/Hinduism, Buddha was made an incarnation of Vishnu and added to the Purana bloatware, while simultaneously obliterating Buddhist monasteries and driving it out of the subcontinent.

<comment><USER42> >Please don't masquerade mythologocal saints/yogis as scientists.

What is a scientist?

Does Newton qualify as one in your worldview? He spent about half his life on alchemy.

Will any of our scientists qualify as scientists after a thousand more years of science?

<comment><USER43> Newton was a mathematician, but he was not a scientist. John Maynard Keynes opined "Newton was not the first of the age of reason, he was the last of the magicians."

"Scientist" is a modern term and I would grant historic figures only that label, if they (disregarding if their conclusions were right or wrong) tried to reason about the world in a systematic fashion and according to empiricism and logic.

<comment><USER10> The modern idea of a scientist is almost purely an enlightenment-era concept, and only represents one revision towards a better understanding of the world out of many throughout human history.

I think your distinction is pretty arbitrary; in what way does a mathematician not attempt to reason about the world in a systematic fashion and according to empiricism and logic? The only real difference over time has been in our ability to determine valid logic, our rigor in what empirical evidence we'll accept, and our sophistication in how we systematically go about this process. Early philosophers were attempting each of these things to various degrees, they just weren't as good as we are now at them. Really defining the "first scientist" is like defining the "first mammal"; the category is fuzzy and doesn't really mean anything at that level of granularity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> "Ski boots are the worst. Solid plastic. They'll be around till the sun goes supernova."

\- Douglas Coupland, Generation X

</comment><comment><USER45> What if past civilizations exhausted their naturally reachable energy deposits, like we now do with oil, so we can't even guess what did they use as we won't find it on Earth anymore?

</comment><comment><USER46> Would our roads would survive? Never before has humanity so dramatically changed the planet in such a fundamental way. Roads from older civilizations like the Romans and the Sumerians would probably erode, but our modern asphalt is pretty insane when you think about it.

If left on the surface for millions of years, yes they would fade to nothing. But in many locations, they'd get buried in layers of swamp and sediment. Even if they shifted around via plate tectonics, many of our modern highway junctions are quite massive. With 7 billion people and the insane amount of infrastructure on our planet, surely some of that would survive if a future civilization started digging a few hundred meters through bedrock.

How long before roads churned under the pressure of the earth into indistinguishable small pieces of rock? Would they be gone in less than a million years?

As a side note, this makes me think about all the world that goes into nuclear waste burial sites, and how we're currently trying to create warnings that may need to outlast our civilization by millions of years.

<comment><USER47> Anything made of concrete would probably be gone in less than 1K years. Even granite slabs don't last very long...

<comment><USER48> What about the Colosseum? The Pyramids are also in quite good condition. And the ruins of Gobekli Tepe are more than 10k years old.

<comment><USER49> It seems to me that commenters in this thread keep taking the durability of materials under average conditions as a measure of what traces would be left after millions of years. By the same standards, we shouldn't have a single bone or trace that anything that lived more than a few hundred years ago. However, when there is a very large amounts of specimens, some happen to be preserved in exceptional conditions or undergo transformations which let them survive or leave traces, direct or indirect, for tens or even hundreds of millions of years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> There's a book series by julian may that deals with a time travel device being invented to 6 million years ago where to everyone's surprise an alien civilization is ruling the planet.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saga_of_Pliocene_Exile](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saga_of_Pliocene_Exile)

</comment><comment><USER51> An underrated sci-fi book based on this premise is _Toolmaker Koan_ by John C. McLoughlin.

<comment><USER52> Author of "The Helix and the Sword"? Just ordered a copy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> Could something like Fort Knox survive as an unusually concentrated deposit of gold?

On a larger scale, would a city like New York leave an area with an anomalous distribution of elements of a similar nature to what we see where there has been an ancient meteorite impact?

<comment><USER54> If you look at it in just the right scale: definitely.

The problem is to find the exact spot to look at. Even today, geo-exploration is mostly a joke: drill where experience tells us to. New hotness: Have AI do inference from formalized experience.

There could be a thousand former fort knoxes or NYCs and we, with our methods, only have a snowball's chance in hell to find any.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> There are so many open questions out there. For instance, how do we know that the bacteria don't form an intelligent species, too? What if there's something else out there, that just is not intelligence but just like intelligence enables a life form to advance as far as we have and beyond?

Even our understanding of the beginning of the universe is just a model, an idea. It's not like we have proof.

From time to time it's quite important to remember how vast the knowledge is that we don't possess in contrast to the one we do.

</comment><comment><USER56> A very interesting and difficult part of these kinds of questions is that what we look for has to be very carefully considered. If we look for just what we know now, we might not find the evidence, even if it's there. One of my favorite examples of this is radio waves. Try telling someone in the 1600s about them; it seems unlikely they'd believe you--but yet they've existed forever (?) and e.g. lightning and other natural forces can generate them.

</comment><comment><USER57> Theres a cool ST Voyager episode about this, the species gets labeled the Saurians. They are extremely powerful and dogmatic, due to living in space for millions of years.

</comment><comment><USER58> The Mediocrity Principle applied to civilisations would suggest we're not the 'special' first one here. We thought we were special in lots of ways that we've since had to abandon

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediocrity_principle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediocrity_principle)

</comment><comment><USER59> Would be fun to find artifacts on the moon.

<comment><USER60> I've read about such events and I am a little concerned about their unfolding along with the quickened pace of development in the AI field.

If any artifacts are discovered on the moon, I sure as hell ain't boarding anything called Discovery One, ever.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> Surely, we'll leave a few satellites in high orbit, and presumably the raptors would have done as well.

Also, their sitcoms would by now have penetrated a decent bit of intergalactic space, and attracted some attention. Because if it happened twice on this planet, the universe at large would be teeming hi-tech societies.

<comment><USER62> Or not.

Maybe the apparition of multicellular life is super rare, but once it has happened hi-tech societies are common.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> I imagine we'd find a LOT of stone tools before the civilization developed higher tools and then collapsed. Africa is littered with them deep in some areas (due to a million years of humans), and they're on all continents but Antarctica.

</comment><comment><USER64> _It's not often that you write a paper proposing a hypothesis that you don't support._

Come work in corporate IT, we do this all the time :)

</comment><comment><USER65> Long lasting nuclear waste products could survive for a few million years that may have no natural occurrences.

<comment><USER66> But there would only be, say 2000 sites of them. Each 10x10 meters in size, buried deep underground. Good luck finding them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> There's no real evidence for this in archeology. We would find little statues of these non humans. we have highly intelligent non humans like dolphins and octopi but they don't have the ability to make fire despite being extremely intelligent, flippers and tentacles are quite limiting.

<comment><USER68> Read the other posts in this thread. None of that would remain after tens to hundreds of millions of years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> The article asks about detecting an industrial level civilization.

But what about a former civilization which only rose to the level of the Roman Empire lets say? Could we detect that?

<comment><USER70> There may be a goldilocks period for detecting civilizations:

Too early and they never industrialized at scale, so there's little to detect.

Too late and they became a stage n civilisation and are now the substrate of our universe, so there's nothing to detect.

<comment><USER10> They Sublimed, Culture-universe style.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> The lizards...and some say they still are with us! /s [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triune_brain](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triune_brain)

</comment><comment><USER72> Betteridge's Law says no. But it's fun to think about.

<comment><USER73> Heh, this is a rare situation where this doesn't apply. The point to the leading question in the title is clearly not to refute it, it's to point out the idea that we _can 't refute it as well as everyone expects._

The point is more "Yeah, there's no evidence for this. But if there was, it would be very easy to miss."

<comment><USER72> > Heh, this is a rare situation where this doesn't apply.

The law states, "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."

Presumably you're a believer in the lizardmen.</comment></comment></comment>


Don't Talk to the Police - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE&feature=youtu.be <comment><USER2> I've always thought Duane is overcomplicating his "How could this hurt?" example: you don't need confused and misremembering witnesses. You only need another serious crime to have happened in the Outer Banks.

Now you've admitted to have been there. You did not have to admit that. Shut up.

Also, how did Mr Duane learn to speak that fast? Many siblings? Time-boxed lectures at his university? Enthusiasm for the subject?

<comment><USER3> His speaking style is very engaging.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you're sick of watching video, and prefer actual text, there's an open- access PDF available at [https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1998119](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1998119)

</comment><comment><USER5> This is a great video, and worth watching in its entity at least once.

</comment><comment><USER6> What about talking to the police to help them find the _right_ suspect? This seems completely focused on how talking to the police can't help _you_.

(I'll admit I'm only 1/3 of the way through this video so far.)

<comment><USER7> There are instances of people initially thought of as simply witnesses to a crime becoming suspects and then being charged with that crime (or an associated crime.) The point of these videos is that in almost no case does talking to the police help you.</comment></comment>


Neural Networks for Machine Learning - <AUTHOR> https://www.coursera.org/course/neuralnets

<comment><USER2> I'm in the middle of the machine learning coursera course, and registered for this one as well due to interest in the material.

My one complaint is that the programming assignments weren't interesting at all. The results were interesting, but the setups were mostly given to us, and we just had to code an algorithm that was in our notes. For someone who understands the basics of linear algebra and programming, it was just a syntax challenge, and that got irritating after a bit so I stopped doing them.

I won't get the certificate for completing the course, but I have a few extra hours of free time each week to add this second course, so I'm happy. I doubt that the actual homework that Stanford students taking this course get is so easy and repetitive, though, and I'm positive they wouldn't complain about not getting to retake quizzes after getting poor grades.

Not to knock the course. I've learned a lot and the professor (Andrew Ng) does a good job.

<comment><USER3> > My one complaint is that the programming assignments weren't interesting at > all. The results were interesting, but the setups were mostly given to us, > and we just had to code an algorithm that was in our notes. For someone who > understands the basics of linear algebra and programming, it was just a > syntax challenge, and that got irritating after a bit so I stopped doing > them.

I agree with this. The programming assignments I've done so far in the Machine Learning class are usually 5-7 matlab functions, many of which are about 2 lines of code (the longer ones might be ~10 lines of code). If you've ever done matlab/octave programming the assignments will take about 20-30 minutes and be completely unenlightening as you're literally just translating mathematical notation into matlab (which is, by design, already a lot like mathematical notation anyway). They provide entirely _way_ too much skeleton code to learn anything from if you're not actively trying to learn. If I weren't already mostly familiar with most of the material presented in the class, I imagine I would never retain knowledge of how the machine learning "pipeline" worked or have any high-level understanding of the algorithms, because the assignments just require you to implement the mathematical pieces of each step, without ever asking you to, for example, actually call any optimization routines, or put the pipeline together.

The problem, I think, is that it would just be too difficult to do automatic grading in a way that is reasonably possible to pass if they don't turn most of the work into skeleton code. Since the automatic grading needs nearly exactly matching results, one minor implementation difference in a perfectly good implementation of the algorithm itself (e.g., picking a single parameter incorrectly, picking the optimization termination conditions incorrectly, choosing a different train/dev split, etc.) would make the entire solution completely wrong.

<comment><USER4> I'm doing the Computational Finance class via Coursera at the moment, and I've done a number of other courses previously.

I agree the programming assignments in the Finance class tend to be too simple. Most of the code is literally handed to you, you just have to understand it well enough to change it. I also understand that even that can be a major challenge if you don't have the background for it.

But I'm choosing to see the class itself as a starting point. It's a framework for my own explorations into the topics. I can do the minimum and get the minimum out of it. Or I can use what's provided as a base and go further.

The Coursera Algorithms class, for example. Writing code that got the answer was relatively easy, so once that step was done it became about optimizing the code for my own learning benefit.

It's like _any_ educational process, you get our what you put in.

<comment><USER3> Right, you _can_ get more out of the assignments if you try, but to me the purpose of assignments (versus passive learning - lectures, reading, etc.) is to _force_ your brain to synthesize rather than just comprehend. The ideal assignment, then, is one that forces you to synthesize as many concepts it intends to teach as possible.

Just like you could go back and implement for yourself the skeleton code they handed you, you could also go out and implement everything in the lectures without any assignments at all. It's just that, like you said, the assignments provide a useful starting point. And I'm only saying they could be even _more_ useful by requiring you to implement more of the complete pipeline.

The fact that an incredibly self-motivated person could learn everything there is to know about machine learning with the course as a starting point doesn't mean that it's bad to make the course more useful for a somewhat lazier or less interested person.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hinton is a huge figure in the neural network literature and an important researcher in deep learning. After going through the first week of lectures, I can say he's also an excellent teacher.

The syllabus, draft though it is, indicates the second half of the class will focus on deep learning, a field of machine learning that has demonstrated huge potential.

</comment><comment><USER5> Just browsing through the Coursera Computer Science listings, it looks like they are rapidly approaching the point where you could put together a CS curriculum superior to what you could get at any single school. The people they have teaching a lot of these topics are some of the best in the world in their field. The Micahel Collins NLP course looks really thorough and up to date, for example I took a similar course a few years ago, and I remember reading papers written by him.

As has been said by many already, of course, the remaining nuts to crack are high quality interaction with other students, professors, and TAs; and accreditation.

But the dis-intermediation of large universities may be nearer than we think.

<comment><USER6> the only real problem with coursera is everyone is posting their solutions to github, so its gonna be impossible for them to prevent cheating. i agree with you though, that the flexibility it is offering is amazing

<comment><USER7> There is an interesting practical question here. Why cheat?

If you are taking a class voluntarily over the Internet, what benefit would be gained by cheating? I presume that a large fraction of people who are doing volunteer coursework are doing it to learn, not to keep a GPA up for some other reason (sports eligibility, scholarship requirements, parental expectations, Etc.) so looking at other solutions on Github might actually enhance the experience for you if you look at other solutions. If you find a way to do it better than the other solutions that could be a goal in itself.

This is one of those things I find most intriguing about 'free' classes on the Internet, the value equation is shifted around.

<comment><USER8> It depends on the purpose of your education. In an ideal world, it would be just to learn, but I think employers at some level look at grades/school as a qualification process.

<comment><USER7> I see where you are coming from but were I interviewing you I would never even think to wonder about a self reported grade in a volunteer class. If the topic was important to the position I'd ask you to talk about it and tell me what you learned. I would hope I could spot you trying to feed me a line.

At the end of the day, as an employer, I am looking for 'learners' not 'cheaters.' If it turns out that an employee's personality/choices lean toward the cheating side I try to manage them out of the organization as smoothly as I can.

<comment><USER4> If it were a traditional class at a traditional school you'd just assume they actually learned it?

<comment><USER7> Hmm, that is a fair question. I think I would give more weight to a class if they took it when they didn't have to, rather than having taken is a part of a requirement for a degree.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> people are already complaining that you can only take the quizes once ... he had to send out an email today to everyone saying:

"Many of you are unhappy with only being allowed to attempt a quiz once. Starting in week two, we have therefore decided to make up twice as many questions and to allow you to do each quiz twice if you want to. The second time you try it the questions will all be different. Your score will be the maximum of your two scores. For week one, the quizzes will remain as they are now.

Many of you would like the names of the videos to be more informative. We will change the names to indicate the content and the duration.

Some of you thought that some of the quiz questions were too vague. We will try to make future questions less vague.

Some of you are unhappy that we do not have the resources to support Python for the programming assignments. We sympathize with you and would do it if we could. You are still welcome to use Python (or any other language) if you can port the octave starter code to your preferred language. We have no objection to people sharing the ported versions of the starter code (but only the starter code!). However, if you get starter code in another language from someone else, you are responsible for making sure it does not contain bugs."

I thought that was pretty funny!

<comment><USER9> Yeap we got spoiled with earlier classes: Algorithms by Tim Roughgarden, Machine Learning by Andrew Ng, and many more. We probably need to follow a class on gratitude.

Oh well, to be fair I would donate quite a lot for each course that I enjoyed.

<comment><USER10> Actually all the entitled bitching and moaning on the ML class forum was by far the biggest turnoff of the whole experience for me. I was much happier after ignoring it and my "classmates" entirely.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The only course that is not significantly diluted is Koller's PGM. All others have been dumbed down to a degree where they provide no challenge to the courseree at all.

<comment><USER9> It is not such a huge problem when you take several courses at once. Sadly they run them only twice a year, each time I try to follow as many as possible. I cannot follow PGM because it requires too much of my time, I'd have to abandon 2 or 3 other courses. YMMV.

<comment><USER12> I'm looking at the same problem at the moment. PGM sounds really interesting, but I think that the time investment just isn't going to be workable for me unless I drop several of my other classes. My current plan is to watch the PGM videos and try to keep up with the programming assignments as long as I can, but if it comes down to a choice of one or the other, PGM will be the one to go.

As far as "dumbing down", I've found that the Coursera classes that I've taken (Compilers, Automata Theory, Algorithms 1, SaaS and Machine Learning) have varied in difficulty quite widely. Compilers and Automata were both challenging and enjoyable, Algorithms 1 was about what I'd expect from a freshman/sophomore algorithms class and SaaS and Machine Learning were easy enough that they should be approachable to anyone with basic programming experience.

I don't feel that the difficulty in the classes that I've taken had any particular correlation with teaching effectiveness. I found Andrew Ng's ML class to be simple, but still interesting and informative - you come out of it with enough of a basic understanding to implement simple ML techniques as well as a place to start if you wish to learn more. I think that while a theory- centric class would be a nice thing to have, he's done an amazing job of making a class that can appeal to a wide range of potential students and introduce them to a field that's usually very difficult to approach.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > Neural Networks are gradually taking over from simpler Machine Learning > methods

And haven't SVMs and such gradually taken over from Neural Networks?

<comment><USER14> I am not an expert in SVMs, but I consider myself fairly experienced in machine learning. In my professional experience the answer to your question is 'not quite'. SVMs have solved some problems very well, but I've had issues with them:

1\. They are only for classification, not every problem is classification. The other big category is regression, for example predicting the sale price of a home rather than predicting a binary "will it sell"

2\. They don't have a natural probabilistic interpretation for classification. Neural networks for classification (with a logistic activation function) are trained to predict a probability, not make a simple binary decision. In practice this probability is usually very useful, although I believe SVMs have been modified to give some kind of probability.

3\. I have had a tough time getting them to run quickly. Linear kernel SVMs are fast, but aren't powerful. More complex kernels are more powerful but can be very slow on moderately large datasets.

<comment><USER15> SVMs are very much used for regression as well:

<http://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/svm.html#regression>

Note: the scikit-learn implementation of SVMs is based on libsvm:

<http://www.csie.ntu.edu.tw/~cjlin/libsvm/>

<comment><USER14> Interesting, a quick glance at a paper on SVRs indicate they kind of work in the opposite manner of a SVM - in an SVM you try to maximize the number of points far away from the separator (taking into account class), whereas in regression you are trying to minimize this.

Do you have much background using them? I'm curious how they perform on real- world tasks.

<comment><USER15> Yeah, there's the SVR "pipe" concept, where you attempt to fit the margin s.t. points are close to it. It's a great alternate use of SVM's obj. function optimization.

I haven't really used SVRs aside from some exploratory work, so I can't speak too much about them. But I know they exist!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I took Professor Hinton's course on Neural Networks as an undergrad. This man is the most intelligent person I have ever met. He is one of the giants.

</comment><comment><USER17> Did it already start? Is it too late to start?

Also I took a nn class in college so do you think I would get much more out of this?

<comment><AUTHOR> It just started on Monday, there's plenty of time to join in.

There have been some huge developments in neural networks in the last few years, particularly with respect to deep learning. If you missed out on that you might want to try this class. Hinton has been involved in many of these advances.

The second half of the course appears to focus on deep learning topics so you might want to start there if you already know the basics.

<comment><USER6> you cant start mid-way though ... right ?

<comment><AUTHOR> You'll have to wait until those lectures are made available, but you don't have to complete the previous work to see the lectures.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I tried to do a couple coursera courses and found the video lectures highly inefficient; very needlessly time consuming, even watching them sped up. All I really want is a glorified text book with quiz grading and a final.

<comment><USER19> this. No offense to these professors, but what are they presenting in their video lectures that I can't garner from their writing?

<comment><USER20> Humanity. Which, believe it or not, makes a huge difference in learning subjects.</comment></comment></comment>


Robot Crop Pickers Means Fewer Farm Workers - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-20/robot-crop-pickers-limit-loss-of-u-s-farm-workers-to-trump-wall <comment><USER2> The apple-picking machine from Phil Brown Welding shown not only isn't robotic, it doesn't pick apples. It just supports human apple pickers by putting them in a good position for picking, and collecting the fruit.[1]

Real robotic apple-picking machines are still experimental.[2] Too slow, too fragile, too much tech support required. The video of the SRI International spinoff, Abundant Robotics, shows too many people involved, and too much duct tape. FFI Robotics in Israel has a similar demo system. Someone should build a good one within the next few years. But they're not here yet.

In practice, many apples are harvested with tree shakers.[3] Simple, cheap, and fast, but a bit hard on the tree. Then they're picked up off the ground with another large, but dumb, machine.[4] There's a variation on this where the tree shaker snaps a net around the tree and catches the fruit as it falls.

Once out of the fields, all further processing can be mechanized, and usually is in the developed world. Incredibly fast computer vision systems inspect fruit, berries, and sometimes even kernels of corn and grains of rice. Here's a typical grape-sorting machine, with good slow-motion closeups of the separation of perfect grapes from defective ones.[5]

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJEtz8ejPvw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJEtz8ejPvw) [2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBcWZcjXr-I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBcWZcjXr-I) [3] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6kBvc92KB0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6kBvc92KB0) [4] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzQ0pfbIW0w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzQ0pfbIW0w) [5] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbSww5SBqN4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbSww5SBqN4)

</comment><comment><USER3> It's funny how two people can read the same article and come away with opposite impressions. I didn't see anything in the article mourning the loss of these jobs. I won't mourn the displaced jobs either. They're physically demanding, don't offer steady employment, and don't pay very well.

I didn't see anything like Luddism expressed or implied in the article. Is it Luddism if articles about labor saving technology don't always tack on a fairy tale ending that goes "...and the surplus workers lived happily ever after, assured that Lump of Labor is a fallacy and that there's no such thing as demand satiation."?

<comment><USER4> But the thing is, it's not labor saving. It's labor displacing. That's not to say we shouldn't try to automate this kind of thing; as you said, it's terrible work. But it's still work that someone depends on to be able to support themselves and their families. And usually, with this kind of thing, there isn't much thought put into how to help those who are displaced by increased automation. Those people still need to be able to support their families.

<comment><USER3> I'm a big fan of decoupling the historical relationship between having salable labor-power and having an income that can be exchanged for goods and services. If the productive economy can go Full Robot, I think that it should, and governments should start planning how their people can get _goods and services_ as opposed to getting _jobs_.

That said, I think it's fair to expect displaced workers' countries to take the lead on adaptation strategies for their own voters. Some displaced crop pickers are eligible to vote in the US but I think that the bulk of them are eligible only in countries outside the US. Undocumented immigrants don't bother me but neither do I feel like it's the responsibility of Americans to provide temporary foreign workers, documented or not, with jobs in the US.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> We can regret the loss of jobs to automation, but picking is _brutal_. Very hard on the body. And it's seasonal, so it won't sustain you all year. I don't think it'll be missed.

<comment><USER4> I mean, it'll probably be missed by those who rely on it for their livelihood. I doubt they'll be offered much in the way of retraining or scholarship.

<comment><USER5> The thing is, it's not much of a livelihood or career - you can't do it all year, and it's very much only for the young and fit. And usually imported guest workers.

Citation for "young": [https://www.theyworkforyou.com/wrans/?id=2004-06-10.175439.h](https://www.theyworkforyou.com/wrans/?id=2004-06-10.175439.h) : average age of guest workers issued permits was 22.

Broader discussion of fruit picking seasonal immigration (which mentions automation too): [https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/2016-11-30/debates/9F8...](https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/2016-11-30/debates/9F85AF34-B112-4AA8-BBF7-6ECB4542EC14/SeasonalAgriculturalWorkersScheme)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have friends that have lived, worked and farmed in Watsonville, CA for a long time. My wife's grandfather has also farmed in MI for decades. The consensus is that farm-workers are getting harder and harder to come by. There is a labor shortage. This shortage has encouraged the investments and greater interest in picking technologies.

So to reframe, there are fewer farm workers anyway, due to better border control, lack of interest, or whatever and the picking technologies become more useful.

<comment><USER7> >>There is a labor shortage. This shortage has encouraged the investments and greater interest in picking technologies.

It's funny how it hasn't encouraged paying people more.

<comment><USER6> Its tough to raise the price of an agricultural product to accommodate for higher wages. The market sets the price.

Plus its literally backbreaking work. Illegals would rather hang drywall, paint houses or whatever and make 50% more.

<comment><USER8> And it's an international market. Pickers in America are competing against the cost of labor in developing nations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> We read quite a bit on here about robots and machine learning replacing jobs. Yet productivity growth seems to be almost stagnant, last I heard. So judging by the statistics, this is as yet not a real, large scale phenomenon.

</comment><comment><USER10> It would have been nice of Bloomberg to mention that Brad Goehring is a politician. [https://www.facebook.com/pg/Brad- Goehring-118538778165929/ab...](https://www.facebook.com/pg/Brad- Goehring-118538778165929/about/)

</comment><comment><USER11> harvest automation is the most difficult and imo, the least urgent. there is a difference between robots assisting human labour and robots replacing human labour.

strawberry picking in japanese hydroponic farms comes closest to decent automation. the robotic gripper can pick the ripest strawberry just in time. this is mostly possible because ripe strawberries can be easily recognised because it completely turns colour. colour sensors are utilised here. i have heard of brix measuring also, but i cant imagine how it can be done.

strawberry picking is brutal in a regular farm and it is hideous for the soil. it has to be picked a tad unripe so it is ripe when it reaches the supermarket or wholesalers. that's why u-pick strawberry farms are so prevalent.

dutch milking robots are the best example of automation in agriculture..altho' its not technically 'agriculture', but rather animal husbandry..but..oh well.

</comment><comment><USER12> This site has estimates for agricultural workforce over time: [https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural- employment/](https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-employment/)

It is impressive to see how small the fraction has gotten already.

</comment><comment><USER13> Robots have been replacing farm workers a lot longer than this. 200 years ago, 90% of the population was involved in farming. Today, it's less than 3%.

</comment><comment><USER14> there is a huge opportunity for robotic in farming. Tech industry completely ignores it because it's not sexy enough!

<comment><USER15> or is it because a fruit picker working for a few $ per hour is just cheaper?

<comment><USER14> hiring taxi drivers are relatively cheap too, but all big tech companies are investing on self driving cars. and because of all the investments and research we know we will have a working model soon. also investment reduce the cost. I can argue that cheaper and better food is even more important for the society and human race than autonomous cars, but because it is not sexy enough no one really spent money on it!

<comment><USER15> Is all this investment in self driving cars done to replace taxi drivers? Will food get cheaper if picked by robots? And even if, what the use of it if nobody can pay the cheaper prices anymore, because they don't have work anymore, because their work is done by robots? Do you really think big money does decide by sexiness of the product where to invest? Like some JS Hippster selects a framework?

<comment><USER14> yes absolutely I believe that is how investments get decided on big corporations. think about it, the only goal of any CEO is to drive the stock price up. investing on sexy projects create hype and drives the stock prices up, the more you get media coverage about your new project and more people here about it, there going to be more investors and stock prices are going higher !

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Email puts mail delivery man out of work.

This luddite news clickbait should not have a place on HN.

<comment><USER17> Historically, the luddite concern was that technology would replace humans _with no consideration for what society would do with /for those humans_. This was, and assuredly still is, a valid and pressing concern.

Technologies (outside of military) are rarely regarded as intrinsically bad, but very few administrations over the millennia have felt comfortable talking to their citizenry about how they're going to approach massive social and economic changes.

This is in part a failing with governments throughout history, but doubtless also a sad indictment on human nature (difficulty with short vs long term plans, concerns over wealth disparity, preference for inherited social expectations / status quo, etc).

</comment></comment><comment> rm_-rf_slash Just gonna put an idea out here: what if food was so abundant it was free? How much cheaper would it be to live? How much could be saved on redistribution schemes like unemployment benefits or Social Security?

50,000 years ago, everybody's job was to find or hunt food. If you didn't your kin-group starved. Then the Ice Ages thawed and we developed agriculture, so only about 70% of the people had to produce food, while the others could specialize in the production of tools or the provision of services like health care. Industrialization and the Green Revolution have made food so plentiful, we can have foods from all over the world available to us at any time of year.

So instead of worrying about the future of yesterday's dead jobs, let's make the cost of living as low as possible.

<comment><USER18> > Just gonna put an idea out here: what if food was so abundant it was free?

The land it's farmed on has inherent value to someone; there's no amount of labor cost reduction or automation that can bring food costs below the value of the land + whatever raw materials go into production (seed, feed, whatever).

> Industrialization and the Green Revolution have made food so plentiful, we > can have foods from all over the world available to us at any time of year.

And yet people starve all over the place; not just in 3rd world countries but here in the USA. So either it's not that plentiful or we have a serious logistical problem.

<comment><USER12> > And yet people starve all over the place; not just in 3rd world countries > but here in the USA. So either it's not that plentiful or we have a serious > logistical problem.

It is the latter, in case you were curious. Access to food requires uninterrupted distribution, which is not always the case.

<comment><USER19> I don't think it's distribution - there is food available in every store I've seen. It's money to buy the food with, or money to buy mobility to get to the food.

<comment><USER20> They've been playing a PSA lately saying that "40% of the food produced in America goes to waste". So, on average, people in this country are already spending close to double the amount that they should for food.

So, there's distribution from farm to store to home, but there's a non- existent link out of the home into a second-stage distribution pipeline, or something.

<comment><USER11> i have a farm and more than 40% never reaches anyone. it is not worth it for me to harvest it even to donate it because the labour would wipe out my profits. but if i let it rot and decompose..make my own compost, there is some value in it for me. isnt that awful? but yea...farming reality. it is what it is..

<comment><USER20> Is that one of the situations where subsidies make it worth it to grow in the first place? Or where growing it as use for fertilizer makes it worthwhile?

I'd note that the paper that your sibling comment posted breaks down waste into the different segments of the supply chain. The biggest single chunk looks like they're in the "consumer losses" segment, and that the PSAs I've seen are focused on how to interpret "best by" dates, eating leftovers, and buying only what you need right then, rather than trying to blame farms for waste.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Sooo... the workers still doing the work get paid more than they used to and we create new jobs designing and manufacturing the equipment. HN really needs to starting flagging these poor stupid workers will all be out of work porn.

Diagnosing doctors will be replaced way before migrant farm labor disappears.

<comment><USER22> Do you really think the proportions of that are going to work out? That laying off a thousand farm workers will somehow generate a thousand replacement engineering jobs (and that these farm workers will somehow get trained to fill them)?

<comment><USER21> They will not be laid off in such numbers because there is little economic incentive to do so. Machines cost a lot of money. And they require maintenance over time. You have to realize how little these workers make. Paying US rent full time a person could barely afford to feed and shelter themselves on the money these workers make.

We are talking 50 cents a bucket. Pennies per item. There is not a lot of room for automation to undercut.

Workers in decision making and diagnosis type roles cost significantly more and mostly only require software(not hardware) to replace. Think about how much a doctor gets paid per cancer diagnosis? Or per cancer treatment prescribed?</comment></comment></comment>


A brief introduction to the beauty of Information Theory - <AUTHOR> https://notamonadtutorial.com/a-brief-introduction-to-the-beauty-of-information-theory-8357f5b6a355 <comment><USER2> Shameless plug: I'm trying to start an online reading group for "Elements of Information Theory" by Cover and Thomas.

If you're interested, please join ([https://www.reddit.com/r/mathreadinggroup/](https://www.reddit.com/r/mathreadinggroup/)) and the discord ([https://discord.gg/D9FjZXs](https://discord.gg/D9FjZXs)).

</comment><comment><USER3> This is an interesting topic and is closely related to what I am working on at the moment.

One interesting thing I can say is that while subsets of a set are the language of probability and of logic (the existential quantifier and the universal quantifier are the two adjoints of the inverse image function), we have the dual to be the language of entropy: partitions of a set.

You can unify the two via a self-dual set theory, where you essentially replace the notions of subset (i.e., subobjects) and partitions (i.e., quotient objects) with an abstract subobject notion. This was part of the basis for my MSc and then my supervisor and a colleague of mine [1] showed that you can have what they call a Noetherian form over the category of sets. It is essentially by taking the pullback of the subobject and quotient object functors, though I can't remember if it is the usual pullback when seen as a category of categories.

[1] This is not all published, but you could have a look at the papers of Zurab Janelidze. The key point was his work on functorially self-dual group theory.

</comment><comment><USER4> It's funny seeing this at the top of HN today. I just wrote a utility in Rust this past weekend to calculate the Shannon and metric entropy of a file ([https://github.com/tuxxy/entropy/](https://github.com/tuxxy/entropy/)).

I really love the Shannon entropy equation. I don't know why, but I just find it so fascinating and elegant. I love it so much that I even got it tattooed on my wrist recently haha! ([https://twitter.com/__tux/status/1257737842308022275/photo/1](https://twitter.com/__tux/status/1257737842308022275/photo/1))

</comment><comment><USER5> I like the original paper by Shannon "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" ([http://people.math.harvard.edu/~ctm/home/text/others/shannon...](http://people.math.harvard.edu/~ctm/home/text/others/shannon/entropy/entropy.pdf)) a lot. It is quite readable and also probably the most important paper in the field of information theory.

</comment><comment><USER6> I was introduced first to "gray code" as an undergraduate for error correction. For those new to this topic it could be where you can start for an introduction.</comment>


Maps API Without Limitations? - <AUTHOR>

Hello, I am looking for an Maps API that has No restrictions. Google Maps API doesnt allow more than 2.5k request. Thank You <comment><USER2> Look at <http://www.mapstraction.com> ... It provides a common interface to many map providers, one of which is completely open (open layers). More importantly, you don't need to change your code if you decide to switch providers (or in our case, allow our customers to choose). I hope this helps!</comment>


In the middle of a butterfly crisis, California sees a burst of painted ladies - <AUTHOR> https://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-butterflies-desert-explosion-20190312-story.html <comment><USER2> Just to be clear, the butterfly crisis is not the sudden abundance of painted ladies, it's the drastic decline in all other butterfly species (including painted ladies, with this year being a notable exception).

Insect populations are in decline worldwide. I can add a personal anecdotal data point to this: we were in Africa on safari ten years ago. As you would expect, there were bugs everywhere. We just got back from a similar trip, revisiting some of the same places we had been before. There were hardly any insects at all, even in the rain forest.

Personally, that scares the hell out of me.

<comment><USER3> I lived in the country for the first 20 years of my life.

Insect populations varied wildly year by year. Like hugely wildly. One year it would be tons, swallowing bugs as you'd cycle, the next you'd hardly notice them.

Little anecdotes like yours are honestly not meaningful as you don't realise just how variable these things are naturally.

<comment><USER2> Yes, my anecdote in isolation means nothing. But it's not in isolation. This is a real world-wide phenomenon:

[https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/feb/10/plummeti...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/feb/10/plummeting- insect-numbers-threaten-collapse-of-nature)

<comment><USER4> Yes, but not to the degree of your anecdote. You observed the background cycles of insect population variation.

No person is in a position to observe the next effect of population decreases across many such cycles.

<comment><USER5> > You observed the background cycles of insect population variation.

They openly described their statement as an anecdote.

Meanwhile, you're making a pretty conclusive statement here, without any apparent evidence for it. How do you know their observed reduction in insect population is "background cycle" and not the global reductions scientists have been empirically observing?

<comment><USER4> Because no person can conclusively observe statistical effects, of this kind, in this way.

It's really hard to conclude "the insect population is dropping" by being one person in one environment once. Even by being multiple people, even over time.

That's why science exists. And it's really difficult (eg., cf., the replication crisis).

<comment><USER5> The poster simply indicated they'd experienced an anecdotal situation that matches closely with the scientifically observed declines.

You have to _really_ misread the comment you replied to in order to claim it stated it was "conclusively observing statistical effects".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A year or two back we had a super bloom of Joshua Trees at the eponymous park and one of the rangers said that while yes, it's a beautiful sight, it's also a little scary, because they only do that when they're under extreme stress, it's a sign of them almost giving up hope. I hope what we're seeing with the butterflies isn't a similar dying gasp.

</comment><comment><USER7> I was lucky to see this yesterday, and it was one of the most magical things I've seen in a very long time.

Every time I thought that they'd finish passing by me, another wave of them would come. It was relentless and awesome.

<comment><USER8> They are amazing. With this gentle river of butterflies meandering across LA's clear, blue, hospitable sky you can forget everything from your little piece of sidewalk and just stare into nature's magical distance till the exact instant you're hit by some idiot's muscle car.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Every time you spend a dollar/euro/etc on non-organic produce, food and external products made with pesticide-sprayed stuff, and most animal products, you are using the most important vote you have to support the practices that are causing the butterfly decline.

You are only 2-5 money steps removed from the process of spraying pesticides all over these butterflies' environment.

<comment><USER10> If you believe organic foods are not sprayed with pesticides you have been wildly misled. They typically require _higher_ quantities of pesticides than non-organic crops, due to the lesser effectiveness of organic pesticides. And those pesticides are often effective for significantly longer than their non- organic counterparts.

<comment><USER11> you may find this four part series on pesticide use on organic farms to be interesting: [https://geneticliteracyproject.org/2018/05/21/do-organic- far...](https://geneticliteracyproject.org/2018/05/21/do-organic-farmers- really-use-more-pesticides-than-conventional-farmers-not-even-close/)

<comment><USER10> Thank you for this. I'll try to keep an open mind while reading it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> mark-r A year and a half ago there was an explosion of them in Minnesota as well. Last summer though I don't remember if I saw any at all.

[https://www.dpreview.com/galleries/3708563345/photos/3677554...](https://www.dpreview.com/galleries/3708563345/photos/3677554/imgp7669)

</comment><comment><USER12> It was pretty amazing to see today driving on the I-10. :) It's nice to see at least some bugs in the sky for a change.

</comment><comment><USER13> I remember when a horde of Painted Ladies took over Bullhead City AZ for a day back in the 90s. So amazing to watch.

</comment><comment><USER14> Butterfly populations fluctuate wildly over the decades, there's no "butterfly crisis". We've already seen such declines followed by huge population bursts after some time. There's no reason to speculate that this won't happen again.

<comment> Const-me There is butterfly species crisis, many are endangered and will go extinct soon.

At the same time there's no butterfly quantity crisis.

I wonder about journalists writing news titles, are they stupid, or do they pretend they are?

<comment><USER15> Think of the truth as a salmon trying to spawn, and all the challenges that beset it.

Miscommunication, misunderstanding is the norm. We just have to power thru it.</comment></comment></comment>


Android App Sales Between 1% and 200% of iPhone Counterparts - <AUTHOR> http://www.entrelife.com/2013/01/case-study-of-android-vs-iphone-app.html

<comment><AUTHOR> OP here. Feel free to ask me anything.</comment>


Python Idioms in Rust - <AUTHOR> http://benjamincongdon.me/blog/2018/03/23/Python-Idioms-in-Rust/ <comment><USER2> Very strange to see the core primitives of functional programming being sold as 'Pythonic'.

I suppose we all look at the world from the perspective of our own experience.

<comment><USER3> Honestly I suspect that this stems from a perception particularly among people from a non-traditional CS background that "functional programming" is intimidating, whereas Python is seen as approachable in a get-shit-done kind of way for programming novices. Python definitely did co-opt a lot of traditionally functional stuff, but did it in a way that obviates needing to know what a monad is, concern oneself with functional purity, etc., so there's a community of people now who don't care about any of that but are still familiar with some of these idioms, and this post is meant to make Rust look more accessible to them in a way that "Rust supports functional programming idioms" would not.

<comment><USER4> > _Honestly I suspect that this stems from a perception particularly among > people from a non-traditional CS background that "functional programming" is > intimidating, whereas Python is seen as approachable in a get-shit-done kind > of way for programming novices._

Just people from a "non-traditional CS background"? Most CS graduates today will say the same thing with regards to e.g. Python vs Scheme or CL.

> _Python definitely did co-opt a lot of traditionally functional stuff, but > did it in a way that obviates needing to know what a monad is, concern > oneself with functional purity, etc._

If you hanged around HN pre 2010, you'd seen that FP was all about Lisp (and things like map, reduce, macros, first class functions, etc), and few gave a rat's arse about "monads" and "purity" \-- it was only starting to emerge in general consciousness, not dominant as it is today in FP circles.

<comment><USER5> As someone that learned FP when Haskell did not exist and Miranda papers were still fresh, this mentality that only Haskell matters as FP notion really feels odd.

<comment><USER6> I personally feel like Haskell makes a good reference implementation for functional programming. Whenever someone is explaining how to do some interesting FP thing in, say, JavaScript, I usually just ignore them and go read about how the same thing is done in Haskell, which is usually clearer and less burdened with the complexity of getting a mutable, proceedural, eager language to behave like an immutable, lazy, functional one.

<comment><USER7> If you think that immutability and laziness are inherently part of functional, then you're part of the new-school-is-the-only-school problem.

I mean, I'm not saying that immutability and laziness aren't interesting. But FP has a long long history, most of it's not lazy, and immutability is nowhere near universal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > Personally, I like Rust's extensive iterator functions even better than > Python's

Funny, when the rust example that gave rise to the comment looks more or less like Ruby[ * ] but with other syntax for blocks. The writer should get around more and try more other languages.

[ * ] Or any of a zillion other object oriented languages that have decent support for functional looking code.

<comment><USER3> My understanding, though, is that idiomatic Ruby inverts the control for iteration (array.each(|thing| do stuff)), which leads to slightly different ergonomics, whereas idiomatic Python is like what Rust is now; see [http://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2013/01/13/iteration- insid...](http://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2013/01/13/iteration-inside-and- out/) for a comparison. Interestingly, Rust used to have iteration styled after Ruby's, and explicitly switched in rust 0.7: [https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1hl2qr/rust_07...](https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1hl2qr/rust_07_released/)

I think the comparison here is also to Python because the specifics of the API, rather than just the patterns, are pretty obviously inspired specifically by Python (names of functions like zip, etc.), as opposed to other external- iterator languages like C#

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Not sure if there is any point in implementing map_on_vec using map, but this code

        fn map_on_vec(vec: &Vec<i32>, func: fn(i32) -> i32) -> Vec<i32>
        {
            let mut new_vec = Vec::new();
            for i in 0..vec.len() {
                new_vec.push(func(vec[i]));
            }
            new_vec
        }

doesn't need to be based on mut, push and for. Something like this works, too:

        fn map_on_vec(vec: &Vec<i32>, func: fn(i32) -> i32) -> Vec<i32>
        {
            let new_vec: Vec<i32> = vec
                .iter()
                .map(|x| func(*x))
                .collect();
            new_vec
        }

At least it runs a tiny bit faster, without all the pushing.

<comment><USER10> And getting into idiomatic Rust + a bit of code golf + a bit of showing-off:

        fn map_on_vec(vec: &[i32], func: F)
        where
            F: Fn(i32) -> i32,
        {
            vec.iter().map(|x| func(*x)).collect()
        }

\- There's no need for the temporary variable, can just return directly

\- The `vec` argument should be a `&[T]` not a `&Vec<T>` [discouraged]

\- The `func` argument shouldn't be a function pointer but instead take an unboxed, generic closure (no forced pointer indirection, can take a closure). You may even want to accept a `FnMut` to allow the closure to mutate itself.

[discouraged]: [https://stackoverflow.com/q/40006219/155423](https://stackoverflow.com/q/40006219/155423)

<comment><USER11> shep! you forgot map_on_vec's return type. Thanks for writing the comment though, I was just about to point out Fn

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > Neither Python nor Rust has ternary operators (which may be for the best).

Then it goes on to show the ternary conditional operator from python.

</comment><comment><USER13> If as a Python programmer you're looking for a compiled language that is similar to Python, check out Nim: [https://nim-lang.org/](https://nim- lang.org/).

<comment><USER14> Since it just came up again yesterday, it's worth noting that the term "compiled language" is a tricky one to use here:

[https://nedbatchelder.com//blog/201803/is_python_interpreted...](https://nedbatchelder.com//blog/201803/is_python_interpreted_or_compiled_yes.html)

 _So: is Python compiled? Yes. Is Python interpreted? Yes. Sorry, the world is complicated..._

<comment><USER11> I can't speak for OP but I think they are just differentiating between languages that produce an executable binary versus one that is interpreted/runs in a VM/is compiled to bytecode/whatever else

<comment><USER15> And Nim produces a small binary with the ability to tell the GC if/when/how long to run, no need for any interpreter or VM. It targets c before final compilation.

<comment><USER11> Okay? I wasn't talking about Nim or any language specifically.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Thanks for the nicely written Python/Rust comparison :-)

Is Rust's flat_map() equivalent to this in Python?

        def flat_map(func, it):
            return map(func, chain.from_iterable(it))

<comment><USER17> No, it's

        def flat_map(func, it):
            return chain.from_iterable(map(func, it))

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> The 'single line if' is even cooler than that in rust, IMO. Everything being an expression allows really neat combinations inside statements.

</comment><comment><USER19> It's worth noting that C++ has been adopting python's functional attributes, from range-based loops, <algorithm> , duck-typing, and fold expressions, to libraries supporting Python's style more directly. Range-v3 [0] and cppitertools [1] stand out to me. The former is in a current proposal for inclusion in the C++20 standard.

[0] [https://github.com/ericniebler/range-v3](https://github.com/ericniebler/range-v3)

[1] [https://github.com/ryanhaining/cppitertools](https://github.com/ryanhaining/cppitertools)

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm a bit surprised nobody has tried to start up the "what are tuples _really_ for in Python" argument in this thread.

The definition given -- "Python tuples act like immutable lists" \-- is correct as a description of behavior, but the decision of when and whether to use a tuple versus a list or some other structure can be a pretty contentious one in some Python circles.

<comment> cup-of-tea Lists are for iterating, tuples are for unpacking.

<comment><USER20> Wouldn't you say that lists are for homogenous collections and tuples for short heterogeneous ones? Of course we use the Python "duck typing" definition for homogenous.

<comment> cup-of-tea You could, but I think mine is better. (firstname, lastname) and (x,y,z) are homogeneous collections. But they probably should be tuples. In a tuple the position describes the structure, in a list the position merely describes the order. Hence why tuples are best if you plan to unpack them (ie. firstname, lastname = name).

Trouble is Python doesn't completely separate the concepts like some languages do (e.g. C array/struct, R array/list). You can unpack lists and store heterogeneous items in them. Many libraries do this (e.g. SQL libraries will give a list per row by default). And if you follow the bash read idiom in Python using str.split you'll unpack a list as well. For me the distinction is about documenting my code.

The only real practical advantage I'm aware of is tuples are hashable. I don't think they are implemented anything like structs underneath.

<comment><USER21> > (firstname, lastname) and (x,y,z) are homogeneous collections.

Disagree. In a language with a decent type system you would give them different types, because using a first name as a last name or an x as a z is always an error.

<comment> cup-of-tea In what language would you make firstname and lastname or x and y different types?

<comment><USER21> Well, I would in Rust for starters.

<comment> cup-of-tea Interesting. I should probably try one of these typed languages. When I was thinking of types I was thinking about "physical" types like in C, not abstract types.

<comment><USER22> Yeah, it's pretty common to think of types as "representational", and that really doesn't get at most of what they are good for.

Even in C you can get some good help from the type checker if you know how to use it. For instance, see [https://dlthomas.github.io/using-c-types- talk/slides/slides....](https://dlthomas.github.io/using-c-types- talk/slides/slides.html#26.0) for a technique that can turn a flakey segfault from misuse of an API into a compile time error (later slides do just that for a simple SDL program, with a modified header file).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> looks more like ruby to me than python.

</comment><comment> cup-of-tea The Rust version of "zip" seems a bit odd as it's implemented like a method rather than a function. Little things like make me not enjoy a language as much.

<comment><USER4> > _as it 's implemented like a method rather than a function_

Why should it be a function? It can be a method on sequence like objects (trait)...

Python itself has tons of those...

<comment> cup-of-tea Because the parameters to zip aren't positional, they are just multiple parameters of the same type.

Python does have some that annoy me a bit. I think str.join would be clearer as a function, but at least that does have a positional parameter.

<comment><USER4> > _Because the parameters to zip aren 't positional, they are just multiple > parameters of the same type._

How is that a counter-argument? It makes sense then that the method belongs to that type (iteratables).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Sorry, but language doesn't matter that much if the entire environment/stack is decent. If you are using overly "clever" features of the language, then you may be writing write-only code that has a high probability of tripping up new hires.

I see too many trying to reinvent the database or operating system in application code. Don't.

<comment><USER25> What that has to do with anything? The author didn't advocate for reinventing the database or operating system in application code.

Also, Rust is very much an antithesis of write-only code; it's specifically aimed for programming at large.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Which apache projects are underappreciated? - <AUTHOR> https://www.apache.org/index.html#projects-list <comment><USER2> MXNet.

It is a popular library, but I still feel that it's quite underappreciated.

It is constantly living in the shadows of TensorFlow and PyTorch. MXNet has a clean API (via Gluon) and has nailed the hybrid eager/graph execution model better than either of its competitors.

I have come across multiple ML practitioners who have never heard of it.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> There are almost too many to track but, every now and then, one comes up that blows me away.

I have recently had a lot of success with lucene/solr and wish I had used it for years!

Which have you found useful and want to help bring attention to?

Even if relatively large but you want to emphasize, give a shout!</comment>


7 Ways We've Harnessed the Power of Multipliers to Accelerate Our Growth - <AUTHOR> https://www.groovehq.com/blog/business-growth-multipliers <comment><USER2> Doing things that don't scale: "We do a lot of things that don't scale. That will never scale. And we're going to keep doing them, because they're that valuable." PG would definitely approve!</comment>


The ultimate REST client for Mac - <AUTHOR> https://luckymarmot.com/paw

<comment><USER2> That's cool. I generally use curl for this purpose and it fits me well.

I was hoping it would be something like tcpdump but for REST calls. That's something I'd be incredibly interested in. Right now you have to use the behemoth that is wireshark, and that's fine, but takes some learning. Something smaller would have a market for a web developer who doesn't want to tinker with it, I think.</comment>


Academic Earth - Thousands of video lectures from the world's top scholars. - <AUTHOR> http://academicearth.org/

<comment><AUTHOR> I think there's an opportunity to craft some sort of DIY degree programs, cobbled together from online lectures, assignments (with automated grading?), readings, and help forums. Perhaps it would just be a feature of a site like this, but I personally would love to see something like that.

<comment><USER2> Automated grading for assignments? That's ridiculous. Well perhaps it would work with mathematics, but does that not just make learning mechanical?

Learning is not about knowing facts, that's the least aspect of it. Learning is about making you able to think.

<comment><USER3> TopCoder uses fundamentally automated grading for its contests, and people learn much about programming through it -- the teaching happens from human to human, but the presence of an immobile, unthinking obstacle to overcome doesn't at all hinder the learning process.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm going to have to go back and listen to a number of these lectures. The first video I click on the professor says "Computer Science isn't computer programming." so so true.

[http://academicearth.org/lectures/life-after-programming- met...](http://academicearth.org/lectures/life-after-programming-methodology)

</comment><comment><USER5> I find <http://videolectures.net/> better than academicearth because it also has interesting sessions and talks from conferences, where all the really cutting edge stuff is.

<comment><USER6> videolectures.net has the problem of insisting on displaying stuff in the browser, which sucks. I want to download things and watch them on my ipod or iphone (or Plex media center), without being chained to my computer screen.

Choosing "windows media", a proprietary format, for an open site with lectures is extremely annoying.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> yup cool :) I'm on my second course in stanford X_x

</comment><comment><USER8> Cool site.

<comment><USER9> Yef, check out this discussion: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=529650></comment></comment>


How Kubernetes certificate authorities work - <AUTHOR> https://jvns.ca/blog/2017/08/05/how-kubernetes-certificates-work/ <comment><USER2> Somewhat related: for anyone who's managing an internal/private CA, what tools are you using to do so?

<comment><USER3> [https://github.com/cloudflare/cfssl](https://github.com/cloudflare/cfssl)</comment></comment>